In the aeronautical industry, weight is an essential aspect due to which optimized structures manufactured with composite materials are given priority over metallic structures.
The integration of smaller pieces into a larger assembly by using a lower number of operations and the simplification of the assembly process for the resulting pieces generally implies a great reduction of the number of pieces, of the weight of the structure and of the time and costs necessary for manufacture.
Automatic carbon fiber taping machines represent a huge advance with respect to manual operation and allow precisely taping large surfaces such as aeronautical surfaces.
In any case, the manufacturing of complete airplane fuselage sections with composite materials has its drawbacks given their dimensions, and because of this it has earned the attention in the art, which has made several proposals to that respect.
One of them, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,612,258 B1, consists of the manufacture of complete fuselage sections with longitudinal stiffeners and transverse ribs (and other components) without using an autoclave so as to be able to manufacture sections having larger dimensions than those that could be manufactured using standard sized autoclaves. This proposal involves on one hand the use of curing techniques outside the autoclave, and on the other hand complicated jigs making its application difficult.
Another proposal disclosed in patent application WO 2006/001860 A2 consists of manufacturing fuselage sections in a first step integrating longitudinal stiffeners and curing the composite material in an autoclave, and in a second step incorporating the transverse ribs. This process requires many jigs and lasts a rather long time.